Instagram can be a tough place to be at if you love food, what with all the delicious foodstagrams from all over the world! But it was especially hard this past week when Chef Thomas Zacharias (executive chef at The Bombay Canteen) went on a food vacay to Lucknow and bombarded our feeds with his delicious food adventure. Since the restaurant was closed for Ganesh Chathurathi, he took this opportunity to set out on a research trip, to discover new flavours (as you do!). “Sameer (one of the founders of The Bombay Canteen) is from Lucknow and I felt a connection straight away. It made sense,” said the chef on his decision to settle on the city for his flavour exploration tour. Preparing for a trip like this is not easy, there are recommendations to sort, reviews to look up, but Chef Thomas was prepared. After crowdsourcing recommendations on social media, looking up online (chefs, they’re just like us!), he sorted out these pretty efficiently. “I love Excel sheets,” he admits sheepishly, “So I put them on an excel sheet, sorted it out based on how many times each place has been recommended, whether the sources are reliable etc.”
With all the recommendations and suggestions in place, he set out on this big foodie dream holiday (which is basically all in a day’s work for him *sigh*). What he wasn’t prepared for was the vegetarian food. Like most of us, he associated Awadhi cuisine with rich, Mughlai food like kebabs, biryanis and more. But the chaat and the sweets of Lucknow stood out more than the non-vegetarian food he encountered. “There is this place called Netram, which has been run for some 160 years, over four generations. They make this sweet called Imarti, which is an urad dal version of jalebi, they make it only in the evening. They serve it with rabdi and it’s unbelievable.” This, he feels, is something most people are unaware of when it comes to Awadhi cuisine.
Aside from all the food, the food making process fascinated him to no end. One of the chaatwalas he had stopped at had a pretty unique way of preparing his now favourite Matar Papdi chaat.
Where there’s good, there also will be some bad. While there were multiple hits amongst the variety of things he tried there, there was one little let-down too. “I am a die-hard fan of the Bombay paani puri. The Lucknow version of paani puri is called paani batashe and the contrast of textures and flavours is not as diverse as you’d find in the Bombay paani puri.”
With the ‘India inspired’ food philosophy, The Bombay Canteen has always presented a medley of flavours from the diverse regions of the country. This trip has given the chef a lot of inspiration to work with some previously unexplored flavours. “I had this keema dish at Alamgir, and I want to do some version of that. Definitely some form of chaat,” he says, on the possible new additions to the menu.
In case you were planning to head off to Lucknow in the near future, or possibly after reading this, then here are some of the things he tried and should definitely be on your ‘must-have’ list. Although, make sure you’re not on an empty stomach. You were warned:
